


What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood

by xxx_cat_xxx



Series: Whumping Tony Stark [33]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (although it takes some time to get there), Amputation, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fever, Fix-It, Gen, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt Tony, Hurt Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Irondad, Peter Parker Needs a Break, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Recovery, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark Has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark's Prosthetic Arm, Vomiting, Whump, ironfam, it would be so much easier if everyone just talked about their feelings, spiderson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 21:49:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21043313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxx_cat_xxx/pseuds/xxx_cat_xxx
Summary: The universe is saved, Thanos is defeated, the Vanished are returned, and Tony has survived (though with severe radiation burns and one less arm). Everything should be good now - except that it isn’t.While Tony embarks on a painful and frustrating recovery, he wrestles with the fear that he’s no longer capable of caring for his family. Meanwhile, Peter tries to find his place in a world that just doesn’t feel like his own anymore.





	What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fix-it, but it takes some time to get there. It also took me some time to get there - it’s by far the longest thing I’ve ever written and I've been working on it for _months_. 
> 
> A million thanks to [Whumphoarder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whumphoarder/pseudswhumphoarder) for being the world’s best beta reader and a great friend. Additional thanks to [Sally0](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sally0/pseuds/Sally0), [heyjupiter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyjupiter/pseuds/heyjupiter), and [remreader](https://archiveofourown.org/users/remreader/pseuds/remreader) for helping me with the tricky details.
> 
> [한국어 번역이 완료됐습니다.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22224691)

Like the flame of a candle caught in the wind, the arc reactor in Tony’s chest flickers, resists, and then eventually dies down. And so does something within Peter. 

“Stay back!” Dr. Strange shouts. He draws a sparkling circle into the dusty air, encompassing Tony and Pepper before making them disappear right in front of Peter’s eyes.

And suddenly, Peter feels a wave of exhaustion crash over him. The world shimmers before him like it’s about to dissolve. He sinks to his knees, drawing in laboured breaths. It’s simply too much. Within one day, he went from a school bus, to another planet’s moon, to the battlefield where the fate of the world is being decided, and he feels as if some parts of him are still scattered throughout the universe. 

Peter thinks he might throw up (or possibly faint), and he figures that he should probably alert someone to that, but the only person he actually knows around here is Mr. Stark, who might be dead, and _oh god_\- 

“Spider-Man?” It’s Colonel Rhodes, to whom Peter has spoken maybe twice in his life. But the man looks at him as if he’s known Peter for years, as if he’s relieved to see him alive, and as if he still isn’t sure whether Peter is actually back or just a dream. “Are you injured?”

“I don’t- I don’t know,” Peter stutters, and he honestly doesn’t. He tries to get to his feet, but the world starts to spin around him in a nauseating way, so he sinks back down onto his knees. He can taste bile at the back of his throat and instinctively presses a fist to his mouth. 

“Okay.” Rhodey gives him a quick once-over, apparently not liking what he sees. “Stay put. Now where’s that goddamn magician -”

Then Rhodey is gone and maybe a minute, or a year, or a century later, the world explodes into golden sparkles and Peter has the unnerving feeling of being crumbled up into small pieces and sucked through the hose of a vacuum cleaner before being spat out again. He lands on a very clean linoleum tiled floor, his stomach in his throat. 

He starts gagging for good then, and someone is shoving a kidney-shaped pink basin into his hands. _Hospital_, his brain registers while he heaves up the breakfast he ate years ago mixed with dust from another planet’s moon, all the while his heart pounding with worry for his mentor. He clings to the basin with all he has because something in him is still convinced that he might dissolve again at any moment. 

“Take it easy, kid.” Someone is patting him on the back, and all Peter can do is nod before he is throwing up again. “Be right back,” the someone says, but then nobody comes back for a long time. There’s all hell broken loose around Peter, doctors and nurses running hectically to and fro, wheeling patients around. He knows that he should probably help - he’s Spider-Man after all - but he isn’t sure whether he can stand up just now. 

It seems like years that he sits there, faintly wondering whether everyone has maybe just forgotten about him. He stops throwing up at some point, but still feels dizzy and his bones seem weirdly light, as if he might float away if he isn’t careful. 

Then, finally, there’s a voice he knows. “Kid? Kid, is that you?”

“Happy?” Peter glances up and there he is, older and heavier and with a _child_ in his arms.

“Kid? Peter? Oh god.” He sets down the girl and then encases Peter in his arms, tightly, the second completely unexpected hug today. “It worked. Oh my god,_ it worked_. Where’s Tony?” 

“I don’t know,” Peter croaks, and then, out of all the questions in his mind, he picks the most recent one. “Is that _your_ kid?” 

“What? No, no. That’s Morgan. She’s all Tony’s.” The girl has started to cry, tugging at Happy’s coat with one hand while hiding from Peter behind the man’s knees. “Okay, let me get her to Pepper and you into a bed - you look about ready to pass out.”

Ten minutes later, Peter is lying in a hospital bed, his suit pulled down to his chest to reveal dozens of bruises, an IV in the crook of his elbow and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around his bicep, and all he can think is _Mr. Stark has a daughter?_

After a while, Happy comes back and shoves a phone into his hands. May is on the other side, breathing heavily. “_Oh god_, Peter, oh my _god_,” she chokes out. Peter tries to reply, but suddenly everything comes crashing over him and he’s sobbing, heaving, hyperventilating, until someone empties a syringe into his IV port that knocks him out. 

May is there when he wakes up. The sedative is dissolving quicker in his body than it would in a non-enhanced human, but it’s making him drowsy and slow and his limbs so heavy that it feels impossible to even move. 

“Hey darling,” May whispers, blinking tears away. May doesn’t cry very often, so this must be bad, he thinks woozily.

“I’m okay,” Peter slurs, despite having no idea whether that’s even true. And then, although sleep is pulling him under again, he simply has to ask, “Were you… here?” Because he has to know if she had to spend another five years in grief - has to know just how broken she is. 

“No, honey, I was gone. Reappeared in our living room in the middle of someone else’s family dinner, just to see that they finally painted the walls.”

“Okay,” he breathes, and then, his eyelids already closing, he murmurs, “How’s Mr. Stark?”

“He’ll live,” May says. She adds something else, but he’s gone already.

*

When Peter wakes up the next time, May asks him whether he’s okay with her joining the understaffed nurses in treating all the wounded. Besides those hurt during the battle, many were injured while Returning, snapped back to life in the middle of road crossings or deposited into thin air where there used to be five-storey buildings. May’s a doer - she hates to sit idle when she could help - so Peter agrees immediately. 

He’s got a bunch of broken ribs, a concussion, and a number of deep cuts, all of which are already starting to heal, but they let him stay the rest of the night because it’s not like he has anywhere else to go. The hospital is overcrowded, so they have to move him and that’s how Peter ends up in a bed next to Tony’s. There’s a thin curtain separating the patients from each other, but it isn’t pulled completely closed, so Peter is able to catch a glimpse of his mentor. 

Tony is hooked up to so many tubes and wires that he looks like a Cyborg. Despite knowing that these are the very machines that keep him alive, Peter suddenly has the irrational desire to tear them all off and free him, as if that would make him healthy again. 

He doesn’t, of course. Instead, Peter drifts a little, unable to really go back to sleep, and that’s how he witnesses Tony waking up for the first horrible time, before they put him in a coma for days. His mentor takes one painful, wheezing breath, and the only part of his face that isn’t covered by bandages shows raw panic. He makes a choking noise, gasping for air, and then cries out in a way that sounds barely human anymore. 

_He might be dying, _Peter thinks. _What if he dies here and now and I can’t do anything to stop it?_ But then a doctor bursts into the room and minutes later Tony is out again. 

That’s the first time that Peter wonders how much it cost to bring him back.

*

Five days later, when Peter is long out of the hospital and the world is slowly starting to shift back into a state that once used to be called ‘normal’, when Tony finally stirs and his eyelids flutter open, Bruce expects a joke. A punchline. Triumph. A retroactive kick to Thanos’ ass.

But instead, Tony whispers, brokenly, “Please tell me it’s over.”

And then, to Bruce’s horror, he starts to cry.

*

The Parkers’ old apartment was rented out to new tenants during the five years they were gone. May takes one look at the family staying there, too many people for the three tiny rooms, and decides that she doesn’t have the heart to enforce her right of return. 

Instead, they now temporarily stay in an awfully luxurious home that Happy arranged for them through Pepper. Peter knows he should be grateful for not ending up homeless, but he’d have almost preferred to live in one of the shelters where the rest of the Returned are staying, just to make him feel a little less out of place. 

Everything is still settling - the bureaucracy’s gone crazy, and school won’t start for another month at least, which will likely result in severely shortened summer holidays - but May is already back to work. The hospitals are still overfilled and every person with medical knowledge is needed. Thus, Peter spends his time catching up with Ned and MJ and trying hard not to think too much about what happened. 

A few days after Tony has woken up, Happy texts Peter to let him know that he can visit. 

Happy picks him up with an electric car that opens with a fingerprint sensor - despite half of the world’s engineers being dusted, technology seems to have advanced quite a bit. He’s as grumpy as ever, but somehow in a softer way that makes it clear to Peter he doesn’t really mean it. He glances at Peter every few seconds through the rearview mirror as if he still can’t believe that the kid is back. Peter can’t blame him. He himself has a hard time digesting what all has happened, and more than once he’s woken up bathed in sweat from a nightmare of Titan. 

There are drawing books and a plush toy in the backseat of the car and Happy doesn’t say anything when Peter eats a chocolate muffin and the crumbs fall down onto the leather upholstery. It’s nice somehow, but also weird. Just another detail that makes Peter realise what all he’s missed. Happy is ‘Uncle Happy’ now.

Peter’s stomach is curling anxiously when they pull up to the hospital. He wants to see Tony, but something about the memory of him wheezing in the hospital bed is gnawing at him. He wonders how much Tony has changed in the five years that passed. He wonders what he’s going to say to him.

In the end, it turns out that his nervousness was in vain. Tony is fast asleep when he arrives at the hospital, knocked out cold by the combined force of painkillers and the effort of having been awake the whole morning. He doesn't flinch when Morgan scrambles over him in the hospital bed with her stuffed animals. The girl doesn't seem to be phased anymore by the tubes and wires sticking out of her dad, but Peter is careful not to touch anything, afraid that a single wrong move might worsen Tony's condition.

Tony looks a bit better than he did the day of the battle, but not much. His right arm is gone - nothing left there to be salvaged, they say. His face is still mostly covered in bandages that run down to his shoulder, but Peter can see that his right eye is continuously leaking tears from below a burnt eyelid.

“We'll let him know that you came by. He'll be glad,” Pepper promises, and Peter nods and thanks her but secretly he isn't so sure that Tony would be glad about being seen in this state by anyone. On the other hand, that was the Tony of five years ago, and the more Peter observes everyone around him, the more he realises that he knows practically nothing about this new Tony.

He asks Happy to drop him off at Ned’s and they spend the evening getting up-to-date on the state of the world’s computer games. For a few hours, he almost manages to pretend that everything is normal.

*

Recovery isn’t a straight road. 

Ten days after the battle, just when Tony is able to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time and the doctors are starting to reduce the meds that keep him high and loopy and generally incoherent, Tony’s stump arm gets infected. 

Pepper first notices the chills that run through him while he weakly plays with Morgan in the hospital bed. By evening, he is throwing up what little lunch they managed to make him eat and the next day his temperature is up to 103 degrees. The meds do nothing to keep away the fever dreams. Pepper finds herself at her husband’s bedside once again, squeezing his one remaining hand while he moans and shivers his way through the nightmares and pain. 

He has a seizure the night after that when his temperature hits 104. Then Tony’s heart gives out and for a few terrible hours Pepper is afraid that after all he’s gone through, this is how they’re going to lose him. She has Morgan in her lap on the waiting room bench outside while the medics are shocking the life back into him, not sure whether her child is holding onto her or the other way around.

*

Tony wakes up with a gasp. His memory is a blur of pain and surreal, screwed images of a world in which everyone he loves is dead. But that can’t be true because just next to him, his wife and daughter are sitting, very much alive, looking at him with obvious relief on their faces. 

“What appn’?” he croaks, trying to reach for Pepper with an arm that isn’t there. 

“Drama queen,” Pepper whispers, and he notices she’s crying. “I almost thought we were gonna lose you.”

“What, because I took a bath in gamma radiation?” he replies with a smirk. The words get stuck somewhere in the middle, but she understands anyway, smiling through the tears on her face.

Tony, it turns out, is stubborn as a mule. After they resuscitated him, the antibiotics finally showed some effect in fighting the infection. His fever breaks two days later. 

It’s the only time Pepper has cried since they left the battlefield. Rhodey talks the doctors into putting a second bed in the room and takes Morgan out to the playground for some distraction. Pepper makes it to the bed before collapsing, then sleeps for 14 hours straight. Tony, still feverish and weak, joins her for most of the time, but watches her whenever he wakes, wondering how he ever deserved someone like that. 

He remembers the battle with a mixture of horror, awe, and disbelief. _They did it._ They won, just like the kid said. Everyone is alive, has come back to life, except for Natasha, who definitely deserved better. But Tony knows that everyone in his team would have thought it worth to trade their own life for so many others’, the assassin included.

It should all be good, then.

But it isn’t. It won’t be for a long, long time.

*

“Tony, it’s okay, you’re okay, hey, just wake up -”

“Oh god,” he jerks awake with the leftovers of a scream on his lips, taking huge, desperate gulps in an attempt to suck in air. It was real - so fucking real.

“Breathe with me.” Bruce’s voice is impossibly calm and reassuring. Tony would call him out on not being that kind of doctor if only he could spare the breath to do so. His chest is hurting so much that he’s almost sure he’s dying for real this time. “In and out. Come on, Tony. Look at me.” 

Tony tries, tries so hard, and after a few minutes he’s gotten himself enough under control that the pain in his chest subsides and the air actually reaches his lungs. But with the oxygen comes the realisation, crystal-clear. _It’s not over._ It will never be over. Even after his death and defeat, after being killed not once, but twice, Thanos still has a firm grip on Tony’s mind. The disappointment hits so hard that it drives tears to his eyes. 

“It’s okay,” Bruce says. “You’re okay now. We’re all fine.”

“It’s not okay,” Tony croaks, defeated. “It’s not fair. It’s over, we won, this isn’t supposed to happen anymore -” 

Bruce gives him a sad smile. “PTSD doesn’t end when the threat goes away, Tony. That’s why it’s called _post_-traumatic.”

“I know,” Tony replies impatiently, remembering New York clearly enough, how he never really left space even after coming back to earth. “I just thought that now - now that we’ve brought them back - that it would make a difference.” 

But that’s it, the ultimate proof that it’s not Thanos who is responsible for how screwed up Tony’s mind is, but Tony himself. Defeating Thanos was not a magical solution to all of Tony’s problems the same way that Thanos’ plan was not a solution to any of the universe’s problems. 

He almost wants to cry. “Will this ever get better?” he asks, voice impossibly small. 

Bruce gives him a sad look. “I’d like to say that it will, but I don’t want to lie. You know, my father died almost thirty years ago, and there are still nights when I wake up and feel like he’s leaning over me, about to hit me with a belt.” 

Tony bites his lip upon that admission, feeling ashamed and angry all the same. Bruce is somehow dealing with his trauma - hell, everybody is. He shouldn’t be having so much trouble pulling himself together. 

“Don’t think that.”

“What?” Tony asks.

“I can see it on your face. Stop thinking that you’re being silly. You’re not. I know how much it screws with your mind.” Bruce’s voice is warm as he continues. His huge finger lightly brushes Tony’s hand. “We’re all here for you, you know that, right? And once you’ve recovered a bit more, maybe you could give therapy a chance.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, his voice lacking conviction. “Thanks, big guy.” 

He doesn’t want to go back to sleep, but the meds he is on don’t really leave him any choice. He sinks back onto the pillows. Minutes later, he is falling through a hole in the sky. Thanos is exactly where he left him.

*

When he was younger, Peter used to own a game in which he had to tilt a small wooden maze back and forth until the tiny metal balls contained in it rolled into the right divots. It’s a little how the world feels to him now. People are trying to find their place, struggling to fit in, but there are just too many metal balls and not even close to enough divots for everyone. 

Peter’s lucky. With May, Ned, and MJ all having been snapped, nobody close to him has moved on without him. This is what he tries to tell himself whenever he doesn’t recognise a reference to a movie, or when he realises that his juniors are suddenly a whole head taller than him, or when he mourns the loss of all his personal possessions. Ned is much worse off. Only half his family got snapped, and his mom moved on - and in - with a new boyfriend in the meantime. After Ned and his father Returned, his parents have been fighting without break until Ned temporarily moved to stay with one of his uncles. MJ categorically doesn’t talk about her family, but May’s heard rumours that MJ’s older brother left during the five years and still hasn’t been found. 

Peter’s lucky. That’s what he tells himself when he gasps awake from nightmares of Titan, of Tony’s deathly pale face in a heap of rubble, when he has to dig his nails into the back of his hands so hard that they draw blood just to convince himself that they won’t dissolve in front of his eyes. 

Instead of crime fighting, he goes out scouting. One night, he climbs a garbage heap near their former apartment and finally finds the old suitcase that holds Ben’s few remaining personal items. He cries a bit then, because it’s the middle of the night with no one to see the tears on his cheeks, and it’s all just a little too much. 

May doesn’t ask where he found the suitcase when he hands it to her during breakfast the next morning. She just brushes a finger over the dark rings under his eyes and hugs him tightly before making him the first cup of coffee he’s ever tasted. 

*

Tony’s spent a lot of time in his life ‘recovering’ from something or another. There was the heart surgery he underwent after getting his arc reactor removed, the terrifying weeks in the cave with Yinsen where painkillers were a rarity, blurry periods of rehab in his twenties that he can’t really remember, and the time after Siberia with a cracked sternum that he doesn’t want to. He’s used to dealing with a body that’s held together mostly by morphine and willpower. 

So when the doctors tell him that it will take a long time until he will be able to walk again, that blood pressure regulation will likely be an issue for the rest of his life, that the nervous system on his right side is fried, that he is lucky he didn’t lose more than an arm (and technically an ear, since he is almost deaf now on his right side), Tony doesn’t break. No legs for a while then. One ear, one arm. It’s not ideal, but he can work with that. 

Tony spends the next week with Pepper and Morgan, eagerly awaiting the day he will be allowed to go home. He is usually exhausted enough by lunch that he has to sleep for a few hours, which annoys him almost more than anything else. The fever keeps coming back in the evenings, but he ignores it the best he can and dials up the morphine enough to be able to think through the pain without getting drowsy. He bullies Rhodey into smuggling a tablet into his hospital room and clumsily starts to draw up schematics for a prosthetic arm with his left hand during the nights when he is alone. 

The kid visits one day. He looks tired and sort of nervous, but he is still absolutely _alive_ (which Tony _knew_, of course, but there are only so many times you can see someone die in a nightmare before you start having doubts), so alive that Tony feels himself tearing up a little. 

Peter stops dead in his tracks when he enters the room, his eyes widening at the sight of Tony’s burnt and scarred face. The stump arm is only covered with a light bandage now and Tony’s sunken eyes and hollow cheeks betray the days spent in a feverish haze. Pepper said that the kid visited before, so he must have known what was coming, but Tony guesses that it’s still kind of a shock to realise the permanent nature of all the damage. He himself still avoids mirrors as much as possible.

Sensing that the situation has every potential to slip into the worst levels of awkward, Tony ploughs ahead. “Guess that’s it for the Playboy cover shoots then,” he jokes lightly.

For a moment, the kid looks baffled. Then the corners of his mouth lift and curl into a smile. “I think they would make an exception for the superhero of the year.” He steps fully into the room and carefully settles on the chair next to Tony’s bed before blurting out, “Mr. Stark, I’m so glad you’re not dead!”

*

Half an hour later, the two have pulled up the schematics for the prosthetic arm and Tony is explaining all the special features to the kid. Tony’s head is aching and the phantom pain is bad today - he knows he was due for more painkillers a while ago. But this is fun, this is what he’s been missing for five goddamn years, and for a moment, it feels like nothing has changed at all. 

The kid looks exhausted and Tony makes a mental note to check in with May as soon as he’s more able to make sure that there’s no lasting damage from their involuntary trip to space.

“You’re adding a soldering iron to your own prosthesis?” Peter asks, flabbergasted. 

Tony smirks. “Come on, you can’t tell me it’s not cool.”

“It _is_, but then add some more real-world practical things as well. Like a can opener.” 

Tony sputters. “Next Pepper will ask me to integrate a spice grinder for her cooking. And Morgan will want storage space for Alpaca food.”

“You have an _alpaca_?” Peter’s face screws up and Tony can practically see how he is trying to fit this new information into the mental image he has of his mentor. 

“It’s all the kid. Morgan has a very soft spot for animals. Even spiders.” He winks. “But she’s also into race cars and explosives, so don’t worry, I’m pretty sure she’s actually related to me.”

Peter chuckles and Tony is overwhelmed by the urge to take Peter to the lakehouse to meet Gerald and his daughter just as soon as he’s allowed to go home. 

“Fireworks,” Peter says eventually. “You should add fireworks to the arm.” 

Tony opens his mouth to protest, then closes it again and slowly makes a note on the sketch for the prototype, the letters a bit awkward from writing with his left hand.

“Speaking of special features, I’m gonna make you a suit with the newest tech and then you can go patrolling again,” Tony promises. “I know you can’t wait to get back to your secret identity. Just hold on a few more days before going out, okay?”

“Sure, of course,” Peter says with a nod, visibly happy that Tony has brought up the topic. 

Then the nurse comes in and coaxes Tony into taking his meds and drinking water, for which he has to sit up completely. It leaves him dizzy and a bit out of breath. He leans his head back against the headboard and holds onto the sheets with his hand, counting down from ten. When the black fades away, Peter is looking at him with a faraway and slightly sentimental expression on his face.

“Mr. Stark?” 

“Make it Tony, will you?” Tony says. “I think we’re past the formalities now.”

Peter swallows. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, Tony. I just...thank you for bringing me back. For saving us all.”

Tony waves his hand dismissively. “Eh, a few more times saving the world and I’ll get a free frozen yogurt.”

*

Happy comes to pick up the kid and drop a package off for Tony, who passes out as soon as they leave. When he wakes up in the late evening, the nurse informs him that Pepper and Morgan visited for a while but didn’t want to wake him up. 

After choking down a tasteless dinner (he really needs to make a hefty donation to the hospital so that they can upgrade the cafeteria) Tony shifts gingerly to the side of the bed and bends down to pick up the cardboard box from where Happy set it. It contains the two pieces of the first prototype for the arm he’s designed over the past week. 

It looks almost like a real arm, but he couldn’t resist adding some red and gold around the wrist and on the fingertips. The robotic prosthesis is based on musculoskeletal modelling, is neuro-adaptive, and, of course, powered by a tiny blue arc reactor set into the palm. Tony positions the upper part between his thighs, then takes the lower in his hand and sets out to connect the two pieces and -

It doesn’t fit. He tries again, thinking it was just his shakiness or a stubborn hinge somewhere, but no, it simply doesn’t fit. Upon closer inspection, the lower piece is about three millimeters wider than the upper one. It’s a small error, but enough to make it impossible to connect the pieces into a functioning prosthesis.

“FRIDAY,” Tony asks, trying to drone out the growing panic and the sound of his heart beating loud and fast in his ears. “There must have been an issue with the printer.”

“No, sir,'' the AI replies from the speakers of his phone on the bedside table. “It was printed exactly according to the specifications you entered.”

“Who made those measurements?” Tony asks, his breath quickening. He knows the answer. Of course he knows the answer. 

“You did, boss.”

And that’s when Tony breaks.

Of course, the past week he’s been in pain and on drugs and not exactly clear in his head, but he’s worked in much worse states before. High on cocaine and perpetually drunk throughout most of his thirties. In Afghanistan, with a car battery keeping his stuttering heart alive. God, he invented a new element while literally dying. He is _Tony Fucking Stark_. He doesn’t make mistakes. 

Except this time, he did.

*

The doctors say it will most likely not get worse, but they’re not sure whether it will ever get better. Tony’s brain, his essence, is most likely forever going to be damaged. 

He is still cleverer than the majority of the human population, so nobody seems to think much of it. Tony, on the other hand, can’t help but feel like his world has been shaken to its core. Physical impairment is bearable; he has worked with that before. But if he can’t trust his own mind, he’s useless. Worse, he’s a liability.

He nods politely at the doctor whose last sentences are already being swallowed by the rushing in his ears. Then there’s only silence and the long, deep breaths he takes to fight the tightness in his chest. 

“We’re gonna figure this out, Tony.” Pepper’s hand comes down on his shoulder. She looks at him as if she’s expecting a panic attack, and the funny thing is, he’s expecting one as well. But that’s the thing about anxiety; it’s anything but predictable. It rarely strikes when you expect it to. 

Tony swallows. He doesn’t trust his voice, so he just grabs her hand with his remaining one and squeezes tightly. He once tricked his own heart into functioning again, but this time, it’s the very source of his intelligence that’s bailing on him. He doesn’t admit it to Pepper, but the truth is, he has no idea how to figure this one out. 

*

They let him go a few days later. 

“Daddy is crying,” Morgan points out in a stage whisper when Pepper pulls into the garage at the lake house. 

“I’m not,” Tony corrects from where he is sitting next to her in the backseat. “My eye is a bit broken, just like when the tap was leaking in the kitchen, remember?” But his voice is suspiciously hoarse and through the rearview mirror Pepper can see him blinking rapidly. She can’t blame him - she’s feeling pretty sappy herself at bringing him home. For a while, neither of them were sure he’d ever see the lakehouse again. 

The short walk to the front door and into the living room is tedious. Tony is operating a crutch with his left arm, his stump shoulder supported by Pepper while Morgan is impatiently running ahead of them. By the time they settle down onto the living room couch, all colour has drained from Tony’s face. He is panting and sweating and generally looking about ready to keel over. 

“Let’s go and feed Gerald!” Morgan begs, climbing up onto her father’s lap and pulling at the chords of his sweater. “And then I’ll show you the tree house I built with Uncle Rhodey while you were at the hospital, and then we eat dinner, and _then_ you have to read ‘If you give a mouse a cookie’ to me.”

“Sounds good, Morguna,” Tony replies in a slightly choked voice. He pulls her close to his chest and rests his chin lightly on her head, closing his eyes with a tired exhale. “Let me rest my legs for a bit, and then I’ll see what we can do, okay?”

And Pepper can see it, can spot on every inch of his face the frustration over how his body and his mind are betraying him battling with the gratitude for what he still has left. She can see his love for their daughter seeping from every pore of his body, but it is overshadowed by a fear that’s been in him for as long as she’s known him - a deep-sitting worry that he’s not good enough for any of the good things life gives to him. 

All she wants is to find a way to make him understand that he deserves every scrap of happiness they can find together. She’s told him, in the early morning hours when nightmares would bar both of them from sleep and they were too tired to keep up their usual snark and banter. But sometimes words are not enough to make someone believe they deserve better. 

She settles for bending over the two of them and pressing a long kiss to the top of each of their heads. Then she straightens up, puts on a smile and asks, “So, since it’s a special day, who’s up for cheeseburgers?”

*

It doesn’t really get easier. Something inside Tony seemed to have expected that things would miraculously improve once he was home, but of course they don’t. He’s still in a wheelchair most of the time. The physical therapist makes him stand up for longer and longer every day, which hurts like a bitch and regularly sends his blood pressure down to his ankles. Tony gets to see the living room from the perspective of the carpet more often than he ever wanted to. 

He sleeps a lot. Maybe it’s his age that makes this recovery more difficult than all the previous ones, or the fact that the gauntlet has deep-fried his brain circuitry, but he can’t stay awake for more than half a day. Tony, who has been dealing with insomnia for as long as he can remember, thought he knew how it felt to be tired. But this is a different kind of tiredness, one that seems to stem from an exhausted brain, not body. He hates all the lost hours, hates the fog in his mind when he stays up too long, hates the nightmares that sometimes morph into anxiety attacks. Though it is arguably more bearable now that he wakes up to Morgan next to him playing with her Lego sets rather than a beeping heart monitor and a sterile hospital room.

Tony doesn’t give up on tinkering immediately. He tries to work on his arm again soon after he returns, but this time he can’t remember the exact modifications he'd planned for the dimensions. He hasn’t written them down anywhere and starting again from scratch seems like accepting defeat. So he boxes the arm back up and moves on to Peter’s suit. 

He’s 3D-printed a new suit and is halfway through updating the safety systems when he notices the smell of smoke the same moment that FRIDAY starts sounding alarms. By the time the garage sprinklers have extinguished the flames, half of the suit’s fabric is black and charred, the central chest piece melted into the work table. It turns out that Tony configured the charger wrong, putting 2200 instead of 220 volts into it. The wires connecting it to the plug overheated and ignited the fabric. 

Tony knows what he should do. He knows that he should replace the wires, correct the charge load, finish the update, and print another model. 

But this time, he can’t. It was one failure too many. This time, Tony doesn’t start over. Instead, he keeps staring at the remains of the suit until the spider emblem seems to have burnt itself into his retinas, feeling dumb and useless and old.

*

Peter got his mentor back, except that he didn’t.

_Not today, kid. _

He stares at the phone angrily, wondering why he’d ever expected anything else. It’s been the same reply in different variations all week, and he can’t pretend not to be bothered by it anymore. He knows that Tony is still recovering, but he’d said _a few days_ before Peter’s new suit would be ready, and that had been two weeks ago. Many things might have changed in the five preceding years, but Peter can’t believe for the life of him that any version of Tony Stark would be able to resist the challenge of improving his tech.

Enough is enough, Peter decides as he pulls his very first suit out of the cardboard box that contains the few things he’s salvaged from the garbage dump. The empty days are starting to wear him down, and New York is going haywire with crime. With its population suddenly doubled, people are seeking out the houses where they used to live, fighting over homes, life partners, adoption papers, and much more. Peter knows he shouldn’t go out against Tony’s wishes, but then again, the Tony he used to know wouldn’t make him wait for weeks without a suit while sending him nondescript text messages that explain exactly nothing. 

Peter needs an aim, and New York needs her Spider-Man. 

He puts on the costume and looks at himself in the mirror. The old suit is a bit too short at the ankles and wrists, but it will serve its main purpose of concealing his identity. The one he was wearing during the battle got so damaged that it was practically useless even before they cut it off him at the hospital. And anyway, he wouldn’t want Tony to be alerted of his whereabouts.

Peter climbs out of the window and takes a moment to enjoy the wind on his face before swinging to the top of the opposite building. “Let’s go, Karen,” he declares, and then tries to ignore the ache of disappointment in his chest when he remembers why there is no reply. 

*

It was one of the better days, up until the point when Tony decided to run a bath for Morgan. 

Pepper is away for an SI event and Happy was looking after Morgan while Tony’s PT trainer tortured him during the afternoon. Afterwards, they settled in front of the TV, Tony swearing that he was fine and Happy could go home already, only to wake up two hours later to Happy stretched out on the sofa, glancing at him with a knowing smile while getting his fingernails painted green by Morgan.

His driver-turned-bodyguard-turned-forehead-of-security-turned babysitter left after dinner, and Tony practiced walking up and down the stairs for a while with Morgan cheering him on. It was almost like their evenings before, _almost_, if not for the nagging feeling in the back of Tony’s head that he’d be incapable of protecting her in case something happened. 

“I want the blue bubbles,” Morgan decides when he helps her settle into the bathtub. “And the subarins.” 

“Submarines,” Tony corrects with a smile. He pours the blue bath foam into the water and brings her the box with all her bath toys. 

“Did you take Gerald inside his house?” she asks with a serious frown between her brows. 

One evening the previous week, Tony forgot to take their alpaca back into the stable, cuing it to disturb their breakfast by shoving its face through the porch door in the morning and trying to eat Morgan’s cereal. Nothing bad came out of it, but it seems to have left a dent in his kid’s brain because she’s been asking Tony about it every night since then. 

“Let’s see. Did I bring Gerald inside, FRIDAY?” Tony addresses the wall. 

“Yes, boss,” FRIDAY replies. “However, the porch door is still open.”

“I’ll go and close it,” he says to Morgan. He playfully splashes a bit of water onto her face before pushing himself up with a groan, his back and legs making him very aware of the exercise he did today. His blood pressure isn’t really cooperating with the change in elevation and he has to brace himself against the wall inconspicuously to wait out the headrush before he can continue. 

Tony slowly makes it down the stairs, relieved when he finds the wheelchair where he left it downstairs. He rolls out onto the porch. The sun has just set on the lake, and there is something peaceful about the scene. The first stars are appearing, but not enough yet that he has to look away and find something to hold onto so as not to lose his grip on reality. 

Or that’s what Tony thinks. But when he blinks, the sky is suddenly pitch black and he is covered in goosebumps. Tony pinches himself and then glances at his stump arm to make sure this isn’t a flashback. 

“Shit,” he curses, rolling back into the house. “FRIDAY, how long was I out there?” 

“One hour and thirteen minutes, boss.” She seems to hesitate for a moment before adding, “Your vital signs did not indicate any stress, so I did not alert you.”

Tony curses again. He ditches the wheelchair and takes the stairs as fast as he can, black spots dancing in his field of vision. He almost staggers into the wall before shoving his shoulder into the bathroom door and- 

“Look, Daddy, my fingers are all wrinkly now!” 

Morgan is sitting in the now lukewarm water, surrounded by toys, presenting her hands to Tony with bright excitement on her face. He stops, his heartbeat thudding in his ears and sweat running down his temples, then slowly lets himself sink to the floor. 

“Daddy?” Morgan prompts, realising that something is off. “My fingers will be alright, won’t they?” 

Tony swallows hard. “Yeah, kiddo,” he replies tonelessly and forces a smile onto his face. “Your fingers will be just fine. Come on, let’s wash your hair and get you dried off.”

Tony manages to keep it together until he has settled Morgan in bed. He reads her her favourite book, his voice and arm shaking only the slightest bit. Morgan stares at him suspiciously, so he flicks her nose and tickles her until she is gasping for breath. He kisses her goodnight, closes the door, supports himself down the stairs to the master bedroom, and only then does he break. 

Tony hasn’t had a panic attack this bad since just after he came back from Titan, but the helpless feeling he has now is much the same as then. At that time, he was unable to save the universe, had let Peter die in his arms; now he’s letting down his family, unable to protect those he cares about. Or, even worse, he’s actively putting them in danger by zoning out for an hour.

It’s been years since Tony has thrown up from panicking. He tries to keep it down, but then the nausea gets so overwhelming that he has to scramble for the trash can near the door and heave and retch until all that comes up is burning stomach acid. 

Pepper finds him like this twenty minutes later - panting and shaking, still clutching the trash can to his chest. “Tony!” she yelps, then catches herself and lowers her voice. “What’s going on?”

He swallows heavily, searching for words. “I-I forgot Morgan in the bathroom. She, it must have been an hour, and I, I just- I can’t-”

“Shh, calm down. She’s okay, Tony, we’re all okay.” Pepper crouches down next to him and lets her hand rest on his. “Breathe with me, alright?”

He gulps down bile and air and tries to concentrate on sucking in oxygen. It takes a long time until his heart slows down a little. Pepper gently takes the bin away and then settles next to him, wraps an arm around his shoulders, and pulls him close. Tony feels himself go limp. He lets his head fall back against her collarbones, his body heavy with exhaustion and failure.

“Tell me what you’re thinking, huh?” she asks after a while, handing him a tissue that he tries to take with his right arm before remembering he can’t. 

“I’m nothing without my brain,” he replies, choked. “My brain, my mind - that’s who I am.”

“No, that’s not true. Who you are is _this_.” Pepper taps on the scar tissue on his chest, then lets her hand rest there, warm and reassuring. “And this is all that counts. I know it, and so does Morgan.”

And Tony would love to believe her, but he can't any more than he can use his right arm.

*

Peter is tired and school hasn’t even started yet.

He’s tired from not being able to sleep, from waking up to the ever-same nightmares in the early morning hours. Tired from having the same conversations over and over again, _Oh, you got snapped? What about your aunt? Did you get your apartment back? Tell me, where did this bruise come from?_ He’s even tired of Ned’s and MJ’s subtle concerned looks and May’s not-so-subtle suggestions that he let his secret identity rest for a bit. He’s tired from looking at his phone and wondering whether there’s ever going to be an answer to the texts he keeps sending.

He’s not tired of Spider-Manning, but the crime rates are skyrocketing. Often times, nightly patrols stretch well into the next morning, and despite feeling like he is finally able to do something useful, it starts to wear him out after a while, making him reckless and more prone to mistakes than usual. 

A week after he resumes patrolling, a robber breaks his finger and he spends the night shuffling back and forth between the freezer and his bed, replacing the ice again and again. A woman who Returned to find her husband living with a new wife wreaks havoc at their house and hits Peter with a baseball bat when he tries to stop her, giving him a concussion that forces him to bunk over at Ned’s for May not to realise. She does anyway, and lectures him about being more careful while dosing out painkillers into his palm the morning after. Another night, May has to stitch up a slash wound he got from a man trying to blackmail an employee of the insurance company not to revoke his life insurance money. 

Then, after a more peaceful patrol when he is already on his way home, Peter finds an elderly woman with dementia trying to enter her old apartment in which a new couple is living now. The woman introduces herself as Mrs. Jackson and offers Peter jellybeans from an ancient-looking package in her handbag, which he politely declines. Peter manages to talk to the two men before they call the police, then tracks down the woman’s daughter and drops the lady off at her new address. He declines the money the daughter tries to give him, but accepts the chocolate bar, munching on it as he one-handedly swings his way back home. The sun is just setting and he watches it go down from one of his favourite viewpoints on top of the Daily Bugle building.

“That was a good day,” he says to himself. Still looking towards the river, he shoots a web over his shoulder to the building he knows is on the other side of the street and lets himself fall backward. 

The problem is, Mrs. Jackson is not the only one who sometimes forgets that the city is not what it used to be five years ago. The building on the other side of the street has been demolished. Peter’s web sticks to nothing. He realises this a split second too late. Frantically, he shoots another web into thin air in an attempt to save himself, but it’s fruitless. 

While falling, Peter thinks that the integrated parachute in the Iron Spider suit would be really useful just about right now, and just then his body crashes into a streetlight. Pain flares up in his stomach. It feels as if he’s being ripped apart from the inside, and that’s the last thing he knows.

*

The first time he wakes up, everything is blurry and moving in slow-motion. May is there, holding his hand, and he is in much less pain than he remembered. Peter blinks a bit and tries to feel for the boundaries of his body, but he seems to have become one with the hospital bed. He closes his eyes again. 

The second time, he’s much more lucid. A worried-looking Happy is sitting at his bedside and explains in a forcibly slow voice that May has “finally” gone to sleep and Tony is on his way to the private hospital they took him to. Peter nods, which seems to set in motion a chain reaction in his body, because ten seconds later he is retching bile into a basin Happy hastily shoved under his chin. 

They had to remove his spleen, Peter learns later, when his stomach has calmed down a little and he is sipping Sprite through a straw. From what he can gather, he wasn’t in any mortal danger, but that is mostly due to the fact that his spider powers took the brunt of it. 

The cup grows heavy in his hand while the nurse is explaining this, and then Happy takes it from his fingers with an unusually kind gesture, briefly brushing his hand through Peter’s curls before he nudges Peter’s head onto the pillow. “Get some more rest,” he says, and Peter obliges, woozy and relieved that Happy isn’t angry. 

Tony, as it turns out, is. 

Peter wakes up when he hears the _tap, tap_ of the crutch on the tiles. He is thrown back to the walking cane of his fifth grade math teacher until he hears Tony’s voice ask someone “Is he awake?”. Then his mentor opens the door to the hospital room.

Tony looks better than the last time, but somehow simultaneously worse. His burn injuries are healed - the scars still stand out, though slightly less angrily than Peter remembers. He's gained a bit of weight back, but the circles under his eyes are larger than ever, and his usually meticulously shaven beard has become an unkempt mixture of grey and black. All in all, he has the air of someone who isn’t taking care of himself.

“You look kind of bad,” Peter starts, and maybe this isn’t exactly a polite thing to say, but his brain is still a bit messy and a part of him is simply pissed at his mentor.

“You are one to talk, boy-without-a-spleen,” Tony rebutts, the sarcasm sharp, his usual playfulness lacking completely. “So that’s what I get for snapping your ass back and asking you not to play superhero for a while.”

Peter stays silent now and bites his lip. They’ve been here before and there is really nothing new to say about it. He isn’t even scared now - just weary. He feels centuries older than that time he stood at the edge of the city and Tony took his suit away. 

“So we’re doing the not-talking thing now?” Tony asks, almost casually. He sits down heavily on the chair that Happy left abandoned, and it doesn’t escape Peter’s notice that a sheen of sweat has already formed on his forehead from the strain it seems to have taken him to come here. “Because, trust me, I’ve got four decades more experience playing that game than you.”

“That’s not it,” Peter protests. “It’s not like I _want_ to go against you, but what was I supposed to do? Sit at home while all this crime is going on in my city and do nothing about it?” He takes a breath, his cheeks burning from anger and embarrassment. “Nobody even hurt me, okay? This just happened because I messed up.”

“Is that supposed to reassure me?” Tony demands. “Because it’s literally doing the exact opposite. Fuck, kid - do you realise that this is exactly why I asked you not to go out? You need to get used to the city again, get settled in your new life. I asked you to wait. I wanted to keep you safe -”

“But I don’t want to be safe!” Peter interrupts, exasperated. “Nobody needs a safe Spider-Man! If you’d wanted that, you’d never have taken me to Germany!” 

That’s a low blow - Peter can see it. Tony’s tired eyes widen a bit and he takes a deep breath before continuing in a forcibly calm voice, “I was _there_ in Germany with you. I knew what we were dealing with. I was looking after you, something you don’t seem to be capable of doing on your own.” 

“I get hurt sometimes, so what?” Peter asks bitterly. “All the Avengers do. _You _did - you nearly _died_. So why is it a problem if it’s me? If you think I’m not good enough at what I’m doing, just say it. Because I don’t know what you even see in me.”

Tony sighs and runs his hand through his thinning hair. “What I see is _potential_, kid,” he says, softer than before. “So much potential. But you would need someone to steer you in the right direction, to make sure you don’t die before you make it through college. And that someone can't be me.” 

“Because you have your family, I get it.” Peter tries not to sound too bitter, not to let the nagging, ugly feeling of jealousy take over. 

“No, Peter - no that's not -” Tony cuts himself off, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. “Damnit, kid!” he snaps. “Why do you have to make this so hard?”

There's tears burning in Peters eyes because it's not_ him_ who's making it hard, it's his life that won't ever give him a damn thing for free, ever let him keep something beautiful.

“Kid. Look at me,” Tony urges him. “I care about you, a lot, okay? I can't watch you get hurt, not after…” Tony trails off, swallows, looks away. “I realise that I can’t keep you away from patrolling. It was dumb of me to even try, and I won’t do it again. But I can’t - I won’t be involved in this anymore.”

It’s like someone has punched Peter in the gut. He would have been fine with Tony banning him from patrolling or talking May into giving him house arrest. He expected that, almost. That would have easily been worth the crimes he prevented over the last week. But this - this hurts somewhere else, somewhere deeper than his pride and his childish desire to be taken seriously. 

Everything he thought was there between Tony and him seems to have dissolved to dust on Titan.

Tony takes out his sunglasses and puts them on, not bothered by the fact that it’s still before sunrise. “You know that bird guy you webbed to the floor during our little tussle in Germany? Calls himself Falcon. I’m not a fan, but I think it might be good for you to meet up with him sometime, practice superheroing. He’s got…” Tony takes a deep breath, his voice shaking a little now. He suddenly looks so, so old. “He’s got Cap’s shield now, I’ve heard. I’ll ask Happy to send him your number.” 

_He doesn’t want me. I’m a burden. _

Any reply burning in Peter’s throat is gone. When he looks up, he thinks he glimpses tears in Tony's good eye, behind the dark glasses. 

Peter’s own eyes are stinging. He swallows. “Okay, Mr. Stark,” he says tonelessly. 

His legs feel numb when he pushes himself up. There’s a heavy feeling of nausea in his stomach that has nothing to do with his injury. “I’ll go and take a shower,” he adds without looking up at the older man.

“Will you be okay on your own?” Tony asks.

Peter doesn’t even know whether this is about the shower or something bigger. He tries not to care too much. “Yeah. It’s fine.” 

He doesn’t look back before shutting the door. 

*

“It’s fine,” Peter told Tony.

But it isn’t. Nothing is fine. 

Peter gets out of the hospital the next day, and that same evening, he’s back on the streets. Happy sends him Falcon’s number, and apparently, even sent Falcon Peter’s because he receives a constant thread of texts asking for a meeting. Peter ignores them; the last thing he needs is another person promising to look after him only to quit halfway through. Or, maybe, he thinks when he barely escapes a mugger’s bullet the weekend following, maybe that’s not entirely true. But he doesn’t want one anymore. Spider-Man can just as well work alone. 

Happy keeps calling him, but Peter doesn’t answer his calls either. Thinking of Happy makes him think of toys in the backseat and a small girl with Tony’s eyes, and he doesn’t want to remember that because then jealousy boils up, hot and sour in his stomach. He feels infinitely stupid for ever thinking that there could be more between Tony and him than their superhero relationship, for thinking that he was anything more to Tony than Spider-Man. 

“I see _potential_,” he keeps hearing when he tosses and turns at night in his bed, and yeah, that’s all he ever was to Tony, apparently. 

School starts again and they finally move into their own apartment, almost an hour away from their old one. And maybe, just maybe, Peter should have been more careful in a neighbourhood he doesn’t know yet. Maybe he should have read the news and followed his suspects for a while before starting to fight. But every time he webs up a criminal, every time he hears a _thank you_ from someone he saved, it feels like he’s proving Tony wrong. 

So Peter keeps doing it, studying by day, fighting crime in the evenings, and sometimes he is so exhausted that he actually manages to sleep through the rest of the night without any dreams. He’s tired, and he’s reckless, and he’s doing the exact opposite of what Tony has asked him to. But that’s just one more reason not to pick up Happy’s calls. 

*

Tony doesn’t hear Rhodey approaching from the right with his bad ear, so by the time he realises that his friend has found him, it’s already too late to escape. 

Rhodey cuts straight to the point. “When Pep told me she couldn’t find you, I thought you’d have escaped to the workshop or be out flying around with the suit. But this worries me almost more.” 

Tony looks up from the box he’s been bent over at an awkward angle from the side of his wheelchair, packing screwdrivers and bolts. It’s a wheelchair day, of course, as were all the days in the past week. And the one before that, as Pepper kindly pointed out this morning. 

“Why?” Tony retorts. “Didn’t you all tell me it was a good choice to retire?”

“Retire from being Iron Man, yeah. But Tony Stark not tinkering? What the fuck is going on?”

“Nothing left to tinker with,” he says simply. “And I’ve got more time for Morgan this way.”

“Tony, I’m not buying it,” Rhodey says with a huff. “Just because you got some memory problems? I mean, there’s gotta be an easy way around that. You can programme FRIDAY to remind you of everything important, you can- ”

“I know,” Tony cuts him off. He’s done that, of course - first thing after the bathing incident. He doesn’t leave the house anymore without an earpiece connected to FRIDAY’s server, and has programmed her to alert him of the tiniest things he might forget. But it doesn’t help. He can’t explain the feeling of inadequacy, of constant fear that he’s missed something important, something vital, something that is going to put everyone he loves in danger. He can’t trust his brain, and thus, he can’t trust himself with anything he’ll build.

“What about your arm?” Rhodey asks. “I thought you were making a prosthesis.”

“Not a big loss,” Tony says with a shrug. “One is more than enough for cooking and reading bedtime stories.”

“And the spider kid’s suit?” 

Tony stiffens and sticks his chin out slightly. “What about it?”

“I’m not dumb, Tony. The reason we pulled off the whole time heist in the first place was because the only way you could get over your survivor’s guilt was to either bring the kid back or die trying.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Tony scowls.

“Yeah, and now?” Rhodey demands. “You’re just gonna let him get killed by a random thug on the street because he doesn’t have a proper suit?”

“It’s not -” Tony breaks off, inhaling sharply. “I’ve got him monitored, okay? And he’s supposed to get in touch with Cap’s feathery friend. I just - I can’t do this mentoring thing - not anymore. It’s just not feasible.”

“And why would that be? Wouldn’t it be better if you were looking after him as best you can instead of completely shutting yourself off? Wouldn’t it be better if-”

Tony cuts him off, “Maybe it would have been better if I’d just died during the snap.”

There’s a sudden silence. Rhodey’s eyes keep holding Tony’s steadily while he slowly shakes his head, but Tony can see the sadness contained in them. He already regrets that he said it out loud, his stupid mouth running ahead of him and spilling out what nobody was supposed to ever hear, but it’s too late now, always too late. 

“Nobody wants that, Tony. And I don’t think you do either.” Rhodey swallows, then goes on in a softer tone. “You think you’re useless like this, but you’re not. Not to anyone. You’re way too absorbed in mourning what you lost to understand what all we gained.”

“I _am_ seeing what I gained,” Tony insists, sounding almost desperate in his own ears. “I’ve got my family. This is what counts, not the tech I build. I am okay, Rhodes - stop giving me that kicked puppy look. I am fine.”

“Yeah,” Rhodey snorts, turning around to leave. “Convince yourself of that first.”

*

The warehouse is huge, filled with alien tech that definitely shouldn’t be being loaded into a stolen Joey’s Pizza van. There’s only two of them moving the product, and that should have probably made Peter think a bit more before jumping down from the ceiling with a “Boo!” and webbing the two men’s hands to the pillars. The tech they’re stealing is emitting a constant low-pitched hum and that’s messing with Peter’s senses, which probably should have been yet another reason to wait before he engaged. 

But it’s been four nights and 20 hours of sleep in total, and the paparazzi published a picture of Morgan Stark’s first day of school today, showing a worn-out looking Tony with sunglasses waving to her out of the open car window. The headline read “Shocking Revelation: Iron Man Too Weak to Walk His Daughter to the Classroom Door?!” 

Flash showed Peter the magazine with a raised eyebrow, casually commenting, “Guess that’s it for your Stark internship, huh?” Peter flipped him off, but the rest of the day he just felt empty.

“Resistance is futile!” Peter shouts at the criminals while webbing their feet to the pillars for good measure. Then he fumbles for his phone in the suit pocket in order to call the police, and that’s when his whole body explodes into pain. It feels as if every single one of his cells is individually being hit with a baseball bat. His knees give out under him, and while falling, he can see the sardonic smile of a woman with a taser stepping out of the shadows. 

“I’ve never liked spiders,” she announces. Then Peter’s head hits the floor with a thud and he blacks out gratefully. 

*

“Boss.” 

“Boss.”

“_Boss_.”

“What?” Tony jerks awake at his work desk, his heart hammering up into his throat. “What - What did I miss, Fri? What did I do?”

“You did nothing wrong, boss. But I thought you might want to be informed that Peter Parker hasn’t returned from his nightly patrol. He is four hours past his usual curfew.”

“The kid? What? Where is he?” 

“I cannot say this for sure, but security footage saw him entering a warehouse in Brooklyn at 9pm. A Joey’s Pizza van left from there an hour later, which has now reached the following location.” She displays a map with a highlighted area in the upstate region. “This warehouse is not an official Joey’s Pizza property.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Tony mutters. “Are there any security cameras inside the building?”

“Negative, boss. However, I can locate Mr. Parker’s smartphone in a two-mile radius of the warehouse. It makes sense to assume that he is being held inside.”

“Is he injured?” 

“I can’t tell from the data I have. It seems that Mr. Parker is not currently using any of the suits you made for him.”

Of course he isn’t. Tony feels a surge of self-hatred rising in his chest, together with the all-too-familiar guilt. He should have known Peter wouldn’t play it safe. He should have checked on him much earlier. There’s a whole laundry list of _shoulds_ and _woulds_ for him to deal with later, but right now, he doesn’t have time for that. He needs to get Peter out of there. 

“FRIDAY, inform Rhodey. Get him there ASAP.”

“Doing so as we speak, sir. However, Colonel Rhodes is currently in New Jersey and will take approximately 40 minutes to reach the location.”

“Shit,” Tony mutters. “What about Falcon?” 

“Mr. Wilson is on a visit to Wakanda.”

Tony curses under his breath. He scours the map again, then racks his brain for anyone else he might call. But, honestly, who is he kidding? The decision has already been made. 

“Boss-” FRIDAY begins when he pushes himself out of the wheelchair and reaches for his crutch, breathing through the headrush that comes with standing up too quickly. 

“Save it, FRI. I need a suit.”

The AI directs him to the cabinet where he stores his nano housing units. The Mark 85 would have been a better choice, but he hasn’t even tried locating it since coming home after the battle. For all he knows, its pieces are still lying somewhere on the field of rubble that used to be the Avengers Compound. 

The armour envelopes him with a feeling that is both familiar and strange, like coming back to a childhood home. It also _hurts_. The suit is doing most of the work for him, but the sheer strain of being upright without a crutch is a lot, and the extra weight on his legs and back is enough to have him panting by the time he staggers to the garage exit.

“Fuck,” he breathes when his vision clouds up from the effort. “This is not working.”

“Sir, Colonel Rhodes is already on his way. I advise you to wait -”

“Stop it.” Tony takes a deep breath to drown out the rising panic. “FRIDAY, is there any morphine around?” 

“That is not a wise idea, boss.”

“Come on, we’re running out of time!” 

The AI silently lights up a path through the cardboard boxes littering the ground to a medicine cabinet on the other end of the garage. Tony finds the morphine and injects himself with a dose as high as he dares without his mind getting fuzzy. He needs to think clearly now. 

The relief is instantaneous. The pain is still there, but it’s muted enough that he can walk out of the house and take off relatively steadily.

*

It takes Tony less than ten minutes to reach the old warehouse. By the time he touches down, he is severely lightheaded, but the adrenaline and morphine are holding him together just enough that he doesn’t fall over. He makes a quick detour to the back of the building and then blasts himself through the front door (“_Here’s my plan: attack_”) because time is a sensitive factor, and frankly, he doesn’t have any better ideas. 

He takes the first guy out before the man even has time to react. The second one jumps behind the van that is parked in the middle of the large hall and starts to shoot at Tony with something that is emitting blue energy sparks and is definitely not legal. Tony takes cover behind a pillar (while definitely_ not_ leaning against it) and breathes for a moment, surveilling the scene. 

Peter is being held in the back of the warehouse. They put him in a _cage_ \- a fucking cage with enhanced security that Tony constructed years ago when they were fighting alien wolves in Central Park, and this fact alone makes his insides burn with rage. The kid is apparently unconscious, chained to the bars with handcuffs way above his head, which appear to be the only thing currently holding him upright. There’s blood on his face that seems to stem from a wound on his head where he must have been beaten, but it’s dried. FRIDAY informs him that the kid is breathing, thank god. 

The guy with the electric gun is situated between Tony and the kid, so he’s gotta deal with him first. “FRIDAY, I want a big boom in twenty seconds,” he instructs. 

“Timer set, boss,” the AI replies into his good ear. 

Tony steps out from his shelter into plain view, ignoring the exhaustion weighing him down. He fires a series of blasts that tear through the walls of the van, causing the vehicle to skid towards the right side of the building. He can hear a curse and then the sound of hasty footsteps as the man runs towards the backdoor, trying not to be crushed by the vehicle, and that’s exactly where Tony wants him to be. 

“Hey, asshole!” he shouts. “Come out of your rabbit hole and show your face!”

The man cocks his electric gun. “Iron Man, what a surprise. The papers say you’ve retired? Shouldn’t you -”

Tony never gets to know what it is he should be doing, because that’s when the bomb he planted outside the back door blows up with a satisfactory boom. The man is blown off his feet just as he shoots a blast of light blue energy at Tony, flying a dozen feet through the air. Tony doesn’t hear the thud when he hits the ground because he’s too busy getting out of the line of fire. He almost succeeds, but it’s not enough. The blast catches him at the side, sending him stumbling blindly back into the pillar. 

“Mr. Stark! Mr. Stark, please! Can you hear me? Tony!”

Tony isn’t sure at first whether he is actually hearing the kid’s voice or it’s just a memory conjured by his hazy mind. His good ear is ringing, the other one gone completely deaf. There are sparks of white dancing in his field of vision and the suit is pretty much the only thing holding him upright now. He turns slowly, staggering on the spot, and yes, the kid is awake, thank god, though he is barely holding himself upright. 

Through the haze, Tony can see that Peter is signalling something to him, frantically nodding his head at something behind Tony. “What?” Tony shouts, his own voice sounding weirdly far away. 

“-one more,” he can make out, and then it clicks. Tony raises his gun-arm and spins around, just as the woman crashes into him full force. The impact is more than enough to make him lose his balance completely. He hears shots while they tumble to the ground, feels something hit his helmet, his vision blacking out completely. He fires blindly, repeatedly sending out electroshocks until the body on top of him goes limb. 

Then Tony breathes, in, out, pain coursing through his body like acid, his head throbbing as if it’s being hit with a hammer. He can’t really feel his right leg, but the pain in the rest of his body is more than making up for it. It’s not as bad as the snap - nothing ever was as bad as the snap, that was a million on a scale of one to ten - but it’s enough to let him know that any movement in the coming few minutes will most likely result in him passing out. 

So Tony listens to his own breaths until he is sure he’ll stay awake. Then he turns, slowly, and rolls over onto his side until the woman’s body slides off him. He opens his eyes. His HUD is obscured with blood, so he opens that as well and finally gets to look at the kid.

Peter is crying, the tears that are running from his eyes slowly mixing with the blood on his cheeks. The moment his gaze meets Tony’s, relief blooms on his face. “You’re alive,” he breathes. 

“Yeah,” Tony croaks. He isn’t sure whether his voice is loud enough to travel to the kid, so he says it again, convincing himself. “Yeah, I’m alive. And so are you, kid.”

“Can you -” Peter takes a hitching breath, almost a sob, “Can you get me out, please?” His hands wriggle in the handcuffs. It must be painful, because his expression turns into a grimace and he stops again.

“Yeah,” Tony reassures, then adds, “Just hold on. You’re fine, kid, you’re okay,” because Peter has started to cry again and looks seconds away from a breakdown now. 

Tony pushes himself up on his arm. He gets one leg under him, then the next, and kneels there on the floor in his own blood. That’s as far as he gets before his strength leaves him and he slumps back, barely managing to stabilise himself. The world spins around him as if he’s on a fucking merry-go-around, the dizziness so overwhelming that he’s afraid he might throw up. Peter calls his name, and Tony tries again to get up - tries, and tries, and tries - but there’s a rushing in his ears that makes it clear this is a battle he isn’t going to win. 

“Sir? Tony, please?” Peter sounds panicked.

And that’s what it comes down to. Tony, on his knees, mere metres away from the kid who is calling out for him, yet unable to reach him. He just isn’t strong enough. And this is it, this is the hard and cold reality, the true reason why he kept away from Peter for so long. Because when it truly counts, he is bound to fail him. 

“I, I can’t get up.” Tony’s voice breaks when he finally admits it out loud, “I can’t, kid. I’m sorry.” It feels like he is saying so much more than that, and he wants to tell him, wants to explain how fucking much it hurts to fail him, once all across the universe and now again, and it seems like he can feel the dust coating his fingers once more. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, his cheeks feeling damp. “I am so, so sorry, Peter.”

“It’s - it’s okay,” Peter mumbles through sobs, but Tony knows it is not. 

And this is how Rhodey finds them when he storms into the warehouse fifteen minutes later. Tony must have closed his eyes at some point in time, because it takes him a bit to react when his friend shakes his shoulder. 

“Tony, thank god,” Rhodey says when Tony blinks up at him, the look on his face somewhere between relief and anger. “Why the fuck didn’t you wait for me?” 

“You know why,” is all Tony says. “How’s the kid-” 

“Oh god, Mr. Stark, Tony, are you alright?” Peter is walking towards him with an emergency blanket draped around his shoulders. He’s sort of unsteady on his feet and fresh tears are springing from his eyes when he kneels down next to Tony. “You, you sort of faded out, and I was so scared and I couldn’t get out of that cage and then I was thinking of the battlefield again, and -”

“Shh, it’s okay.” Tony didn’t think he’d have the strength to move and get out of the armour, but the sobbing kid in front of him gives him new energy. “FRIDAY, open up,” he murmurs. The nanobots retract and form a shield behind his back. Tony is grateful because he isn’t sure whether he’d be able to sit upright under his own power. 

“Come ’ere, kid,” he says softly. Peter gives him a doubtful look, so Tony opens his arm and pulls him towards him. The kid leans his head against Tony’s chest, crying harder now, tears soaking Tony’s shirt.

“You’re okay,” Tony murmurs, just like he would when Morgan would come to him in the middle of the night, scared of monsters. “You’re okay, kid.”

“I f’cked up,” Peter sniffles. “I, I should have listened to you, I’m sorry- ”

“No,” Tony says firmly. “No kid, you didn’t. _I_ fucked up. I fucked this up epically.”

“You saved the whole_ universe_,” Peter protests nasally. “You brought me back from the dead! And then you retired, but you still came here and saved me when I needed you.”

“But I couldn’t save you all the way,” Tony says quietly. He takes a deep breath, feeling his heart beat hard and fast in his chest. _Time to be honest._  


“Listen, kid. The snap messed up my brain.” He holds up a hand when Peter starts to protest. “No, I mean, quite literally. It doesn’t work as well as before. I...I forget things. I make mistakes - silly mistakes, dangerous mistakes. I didn’t...I didn’t think I could take care of you anymore. And tonight proved me right. But it wasn’t your fault, and I should have made that clear to you. I’m sorry, Peter, I should have told you.”

It feels weird to admit it to the boy what he hasn’t really been able to even acknowledge himself. Saying it out loud gives it an air of finality. 

This should be the end, then. Giving up comes almost as a relief. 

But then Peter gazes up at him with a look as if Tony had just said something incredibly stupid. “But I don’t want anyone else,” the kid sniffs. “I only want you as my mentor. I don’t care if your brain works or not. You just saved me, you came all the way here, and you - just, please, don’t go away again, okay?”

And sometimes the universe has weird ways of letting you heal. Sometimes it takes months of falling before you hit the ground, hard. And sometimes you need to feel the impact, really_ feel_ it, before you can start to pick yourself up again. 

Tony looks at the kid in his arm, and he makes a decision.

“Okay,” he whispers. He pulls Peter closer and holds him through the weakness and the pain that encompass them both. “I promise.”

*

“Again! Do it again!” Morgan giggles.  


Peter looks over at Tony, who raises his arm high into the air and gives him a nod, then Peter taps the instructions into the Starkpad. There’s a quiet pop sound from the bionic arm and a moment later sparkling fireworks erupt from it into the night sky, the red and gold reflecting magnificently on the surface of the lake. Morgan cheers and claps, and Peter feels a smile spread over his face. 

“Again! Again!” the little girl demands, jumping up and down impatiently.

“Enough for today. Daddy’s tired, Morgan,” Pepper says firmly.

“But-” 

Pepper gives her a stern look. “Why don’t we go inside and ask Uncle Happy to read you a story?”

“Okayyyyy,” Morgan pouts.

Peter turns his head towards his mentor. Tony does look exhausted and kind of in pain - Peter knows that the prosthesis hurts him whenever he wears it for too long - but there’s a warm shine to his working eye that Peter hasn’t seen before. He looks… at peace, in a way. 

They make to follow Pepper and Morgan back to the house, Tony a little unsteady on his feet. “You okay?” Peter asks quietly so as not to alert Morgan, offering an arm to his mentor.

“Yeah,” Tony reassures, but then, after a moment of hesitation, he takes the arm and leans a bit of weight onto it. “What about you, kid?”

And Peter has to think for a bit, wondering about where his life could have gone and what it has actually turned out to be. He thinks of the battle and the nightmares and the hours in the cage and of Tony on his knees, unable to reach him. 

Then he watches the last sparkles sink into the lake, followed by a loud “ohhhhh” from Morgan, and turns back to his mentor.  


“Yeah,” he replies firmly, “Yeah, I’m okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was the original prompt I received half a year ago from a friend on tumblr: _What if Tony is so injured he doesn’t get to feel so happy and relieved about being alive? What if the damage is too much to be completely fixed and he is sad and angry and tries to distance himself from everyone? Maybe he feels like he isn’t enough now to be a mentor to Peter._
> 
> It’s also a prompt fill for the Bad Things Happen Bingo square “Cry into Chest”. 
> 
> I know 13k are peanuts for other writers, but for me it’s quite an achievement and I’m a tiny bit proud. This fic means a lot to me and I would love to know what you think in the comments. You can also find me on [tumblr](https://xxx-cat-xxx.tumblr.com).


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